Kath Phipps greets Sir Jim Ratcliffe at Carrington earlier this year
The depth and warmth of the tributes poured in from the great and good of Manchester United , past and present, showed just what Kath Phipps meant to this football club.
It might be one of the biggest football clubs in the world, with tentacles spreading across the globe, but it can also feel like a family at times, and that was the word that features in many of the tributes to 85-year-old, whose death was announced on Thursday.
Kath started working at United soon after the European Cup final win in 1968 and spent over 55 years working at the club. She was on-site at Carrington a couple of months ago, and for staff and regular visitors, walking into the training ground and not seeing her warm and welcoming presence behind the desk will leave the club with a very different feel.
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Almost every player who has passed through the club in the past five decades has warm words for her. The club was like her family, and she was as close to players of the previous generation as she was to the current group. In a video tribute posted by United, she is seen greeting Andy Cole on his first day at the club, and that routine has been repeated hundreds of times before and since.
When new arrivals walked into Carrington, Kath was often the first face they saw. Earlier this year, she was one of the first people to greet Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who had made his way around the training ground after his £1.25bn investment in the club was confirmed.
The stories of her time at the club are also legion, from sifting through David Beckham's never-ending fan mail to getting cups of tea from Cristiano Ronaldo first thing in the morning. In a way, she was often the rock who held the club together and kept that feeling inside Carrington a familial one.
One former United employee who will be hit particularly hard by the passing of Kath is Sir Alex Ferguson. They developed a close relationship, and in 2023, she touched on that bond between them.
"We always had good banter," she said. "We’d argue like brother and sister at times, he’d shout at me and I’d shout at him... but it was all in good humour [laughs].
"If I had to describe him in one word I’d say: caring. He cares. When my husband passed away, he brought the players to the funeral. It amazed me. He and Cathy [Ferguson] were so good with me."
The affection Kath was held in by everyone associated with United was well-known in circles around the club, but it reached a wider audience through the Beckham documentary on Netflix when she appeared as one of the talking heads.
She spoke in glowing terms about Beckham, and he spoke reverentially about Kath. It was impossible not to like her. But while she attended the premiere of '99 earlier this year, the documentary on United's treble success, she missed the premiere for Netflix's slick Beckham production.
“Yes, that was quite embarrassing," she said. "I had to say no to David after being invited to the premiere because I never miss a game! I did apologise."
Her loyalties always were to Manchester United. As United said in their own tribute on Thursday, it's hard to imagine the place without her.